![]() Although landscape has been attracting attention of Asian and European painters since the first millennium AD, the specific reflection on how the humans are starting to have a profound impact on the natural world doesn’t come until the 20th century. My idea was that the exhibition could effectively become a travelling show given the importance of the issues it raises and the book could easily transgress boundaries and stimulate further action.Įnvironmental art is a relatively new phenomenon. To raise awareness of this critical issue of the value of nature I adopted a visual approach and embarked on the key avenues of my Project: design and publication of the Ecosystems album, organization of a large public exhibition and various forms of engagement with the audience, which included among other things several interactive executive Spring and Summer Schools focused on the topic of the valuation of ecosystems in 20. The world has started to employ the monetary approaches to add up all the birds and the bees. The whole plethora of researchers later supported my views, including Norgaard (2010), Spangenberg and Settle (2010), Soderbaum (2013), Gomez-Baggethun et al (2010), but it has already been almost too late. My proposal was to treat all complexity of so called ‘ecosystem services’ with the help of multi-criteria decision aid tools, the methods developed by mathematicians in 1960s that can deal with diverse units of measurements and don’t have to bring everything to ‘the least common denominator’ (Shmelev, 2012:155). ![]() ![]() The other group simply thinks that using money as a measuring rod is inappropriate.Īs a matter of fact, there is a solution, which I proposed to International Union for Conservation of Nature acting as a consultant in 2008 and what some of its staff welcomed as ‘but this is exactly what we need!’. ![]() One camp, which thinks that they have the final word, considers it appropriate to add all the complex things that nature does in monetary terms using a simple sum of financial value of drinking water, food, fiber, a financial estimate of a value of oxygen production, carbon sequestration, but also inspiration and social relations. The world of environmentalists is divided on the subject of the value of nature. Important here are the works by Joan Martinez-Alier et al (1998), who postulated in 1998 that incommensurability of values is a key foundation of ecological economics (Martinez-Alier et al, 1998: 277), a premise that I shared entirely. But is it actually true? In the influential ‘Valuing nature’ volume, published in 1999 a plethora of ecological economists argued that cost-benefit analysis was not the appropriate measuring rod for assessing the value of nature and hey, it is 2018 and we are still having the same debated as 20 years ago. Isn’t it exactly what is happening right now? Many economists are trying to persuade us that the price of nature is also equivalent to its value. The authors of the ‘Limits to Growth’ report in 1972 (Meadows et al, 1972: 157) have warned us that not dealing with just three important elements: namely availability of resources, pollution and population growth will lead us to a severe crisis. Nature is an invaluable gift that we are so bad at protecting and restoring. My photographic practice evolved under the influence of critical theories of ecological economics, emphasized by thinkers as Hermann Daly, who was one of the first to offer an integrated economy-environment model (Daly, 1968: 392) and wrote extensively on the subject of the differences of sustainability from pure economic growth and the dangers that the latter brings manifested in environmental pollution, resource depletion and th destruction of biodiversity.
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